


to the sea

by infinitebees



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 03:20:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11865588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinitebees/pseuds/infinitebees
Summary: a remix of "captain and queen," or: more scenes from the start of anora's foray into piracy, or: how crises of identity are inherently gay, or: in which anora learns how not to be queen.





	to the sea

**Author's Note:**

> this is a remix of hornkerling's fic [captain and queen](http://hornkerling.tumblr.com/post/87891053403/fic-captain-and-queen-anoraisabela-1000-words), an au in which anora ends up sailing with isabela rather than remain a prisoner in ferelden.

It took a while for Anora to get used to the sway of the earth beneath her feet. In the first days of traveling with Isabela, she’d been sick often. When she wasn’t, she was haunted by dreams that she could swear were a direct cause of the gentle movement that carried her farther and farther away from home. 

In her dreams it was her father, not the sea, rocking her back to sleep after she’d been woken by a sudden noise outside. Her father always smelled like the smoke from a campfire somehow, even on days when he hadn’t been near one (that was most days, more and more recently). It was before Maric died — all her memories of her father are fondest when they’re before Maric died. It left a mark on all their lives, but none more than Loghain — and before she started to grow up in earnest. And when she woke she would be alone again in a cabin that felt too small for her homesickness, in a dark that felt too calm to belong to her.

It was hard not to resent Isabela, in those days. In the absence of Alistair’s presence, Anora just felt angry. Isabela put a stop to it quickly — she wouldn’t tolerate being the misplaced object of Anora’s ire — but even if she stopped showing it she couldn’t stop feeling it. It simmered beneath her skin, hot like those summer days that are too uncomfortable to do anything but sit and want to scream. And so she was silent most days. Most days she merely observed: the way the wind carried the taste of salt, altogether different from the air in Denerim; the way her stomach flipped day after day in a manner to which she wanted to become accustomed but which she also knew she’d miss, somehow, miserable though it was; Isabela at the bow, competent and unyielding and still human but ethereal, too, somehow, as she commanded her crew. Anora worked, too, and little by little the anger was replaced by a strange calm that she couldn’t explain if she wanted to, even if she was still constantly uneasy, plagued by the feeling that there was somewhere else she was meant to be.

The anger, the seasickness, the dreams that haunted her as the ship rocked in the night — slowly they slipped away; but that other feeling, some strange homesick relative of wanderlust, lingers still.

-

“Are you happy this way?”

Isabela looks up from a yellowed map to find Anora gazing at her from the bed. She doesn’t know how long she’s been staring, either; Anora has a strange habit of doing that, as though she’s trying to memorize every part of you. Maybe it made her a good politician in Denerim, but here it’s just disconcerting. Especially to Isabela, so unused to scrutiny from others. Others see a pirate, a woman, and nothing else; someone to desire, or to fear. Anora, though, sees Isabela, or at least tries to. 

Now she stares back at Anora and smiles. “What way, sweet thing?”

“I mean,” she says, “are you happy doing this? Really happy?”

Isabela rises from her desk to sit beside Anora, brushing her hair back from her face and making her wrinkle her nose with how familiar the gesture is. It was strange for Anora at first; no one, aside from her parents and, occasionally Cailan, had been particularly affectionate with her. And she’d always associated affection with love. But for Isabela, it’s just something she does. “A way of getting to know you,” she’d said when asked.

Now she looks from Anora to the cabin wall and shrugs. “What is happiness, anyway?” she asks. “I don’t think it’s a permanent state of being. That’d be boring. I don’t want to be one of those people constantly trying to claw their way to ‘happiness.’ You don’t ever get there if it’s all you ever think about.”

“That just sounds sad,” Anora says after a moment of consideration. 

“What’s so sad about it? I’m happy in the moment — I’m doing what I was meant to do. It’s my ship under my feet right now, my crew tending to it. Even the wind is mine, in a way, when it beats against my sails. And,” Isabela adds with a grin, “there’s a pretty woman in my bed.” She only laughs when Anora half-heartedly nudges her with her elbow, bright and loud the way Anora never heard anyone in court laugh. It reminds her of a bird somehow; something taking flight, knowing it can roam as far as it pleases. Then she sobers. 

“All I’m saying is that you can’t make it your life’s work, sweet thing, and it seems to me that that’s what you’re looking for. So stop looking for it, and just…” Isabela spread her arms and gestured around herself. “… find you.”

Anora doesn’t know what to say. She never really does, when Isabela starts giving advice like this, if that’s what this can be called. Eventually she settles for, “So wisdom does become you.” And before she can say anything more, Anora pulls Isabela in for a kiss as she lays down on the mattress.

-

She takes Isabela’s advice to heart, of course. She takes… Isabela to heart. She’s everything Anora had wanted to be as a child — a woman who answers to no one, who calls all the world home — and everything that had been taken from her when she married Cailan. Or maybe she had given it away. What happens to a woman’s life? Anora wonders. How does it end, and where? Hers ended with marriage, with queendom and the intricacies of the court that her father had never had to learn. He’d earned his nobility, but Anora had only been born into it, had had to grow into it. 

Loghain didn’t take her life from her; Maric didn’t, either. If she were being honest with herself, not even Alistair did. But neither did she give it away, and for years she’s felt impotent and helpless to the whims of the world, of the court. Isabela, though -- Isabela’s taken her own back. Anora’s beginning to think perhaps that’s what is happening to her, too, now. For each mile she gains between Ferelden and her own body, she’s reclaiming something. Getting to know a woman who never was queen and never will have to be. 

She’s staring into the grey of the sea when she feels Isabela’s hand on her shoulder. 

“I can hear you thinking,” she says.

Anora turns to face her and looks into the gold of her eyes, and smiles. “How does it sound?”

Isabela says, “Like a song I heard somewhere before.”


End file.
